Qualla: Shaw (Washington, D.C.)

Shaw (Washington, D.C.): Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo by User:Aude, CC BY-SA 2.5. When Langston Hughes was a student at Lincoln University in the mid-1920s, he would catch the train down to Washington and walk south from LeDroit Park into Shaw. He came for what he called the sad songs of 7th Street - the blues and barrelhouse piano spilling out of clubs, the unstudied music of people whose lives Hughes was determined to put into poetry. Shaw at that moment was the pre-Harlem center of Black intellectual and cultural life in America. Alain Locke was a few blocks away at Howard, working on the essays that would become The New Negro. Carter G. Woodson, the father of African American history, lived on Ninth Street and ran his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History out of his rowhouse. Duke Ellington had grown up here. The neighborhood would gentrify, burn, empty out, and gentrify again over the next century. But in 1925 it was, simply, the place.

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Image: Photo by User:Aude | CC BY-SA 2.5

Shaw (Washington, D.C.): Uptown

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0. Shaw began as a cluster of freedmen's encampments north of Boundary Street - the old northern edge of the city, now called Florida Avenue. After emancipation, formerly enslaved people moved into the rural outskirts of Washington and built shanties, then slowly improved them, then...

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Image: Farragutful | CC BY-SA 4.0

Shaw (Washington, D.C.): April 1968

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 4.0. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Riots broke out in Washington within hours, focused along 7th Street through Shaw, the H Street corridor in Northeast, and 14th Street through Columbia Heights. By the time the National Guard arrived, blocks of Shaw w...

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Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY-SA 4.0

Shaw (Washington, D.C.): The Howard Theatre

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dhousch, CC0. Long before the Apollo opened in Harlem, the Howard Theatre on T Street was the most important Black entertainment venue in America. Built in 1910, owned by Abe Lichtman - a white impresario who ran several theaters catering to African American audiences - it billed itself in its...

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Image: Dhousch | CC0

Shaw (Washington, D.C.): Little Ethiopia

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beginning in the 1980s, Ethiopian immigrants and Ethiopian-Americans started buying property along Ninth and Thirteenth Streets, opening restaurants, coffee bars, and groceries. The concentration was dense enough that the section around 9th and U Streets became locally known as L...

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Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY-SA 4.0

Shaw (Washington, D.C.): What Gentrification Has Made

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David from Washington, DC, CC BY 2.0. By 2010 Shaw's population was 17,639, roughly half its 1950 peak but already rising fast. The Green Line metro arrived at Shaw-Howard University station in 1991. The Walter E. Washington Convention Center filled the southern edge of the neighborhood in 2003. Restaurants and coffe...

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Image: David from Washington, DC | CC BY 2.0